


Life Must Go On

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 100-1000 Words, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e10 Forever in a Day, Friendship, Grief, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-04
Updated: 2010-03-04
Packaged: 2017-10-07 17:39:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A 'Forever in a Day' post-ep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life Must Go On

**Author's Note:**

> The title is the prompt, from the DailyPrompt community on Dreamwidth.

"I've never understood death," Daniel said. Quietly, out of the blue of encroaching evening on Jack's deck, after a silence of hours. He came here, Jack sometimes suspected, because he didn't have to talk; in the midst of a life that continually required Daniel to speak, explain, translate, describe, report, this place was a place where he could be wordless, and wordlessly accepted for it.

Jack's first thought was, _Death is death. What's to understand?_ The end, finito, kaput, no more. To the living, it was a chasm of absence, a brick wall of the unchangeable, but there was nothing to _understand_ about it. It was what wasn't, anymore. Brutally simple.

Too brutal a thing to say. More kindly, he thought, _Does anyone?_ A cop-out that wouldn't wash, especially with Daniel. No one understood a lot of things. That was no reason not to try.

He thought he should say something to acknowledge, to tell Daniel he was listening, and he didn't know what to say. But the acceptance here went both ways. He didn't have to say anything, or even look over. Daniel knew he was listening.

"It just doesn't make sense to me that sentience and memory and personality and _will_ can just _stop_," Daniel said. "They didn't stop when the snake had total control of the neural and endocrine systems where thought and feeling supposedly reside. The meat of her flesh was entirely coopted, but she went on. She was still there. I don't think it's straightforward delusion or denial to refuse to accept that she wouldn't go on even with that meat gone to dust. I think it's some kind of ... faith. And I don't know what to do with that."

A sharp, genuine pang of envy went through Jack's gut. He soothed it with a wash of beer, then looked over, and said, "You cherish it."

Daniel blinked, then jerked one of his awkward, delayed-reaction nods. "Yeah," he said. "OK. Yeah."

He settled down into his chair, looking out into the darkening garden, the brief surging glows of lightning bugs in the deepening green shadows. Jack set his beer aside and settled down too, surrendering himself to the serene rhythm of the crickets' chirr, the soft brush of the evening breeze, the slow blanketing of darkness, the sparkling emergence of stars. He imagined that he could sense the steady throb of Daniel's heartbeat, feel the arrhythmic swells of grief engulfing it, feel the hard muscle of it contract against the unbearable anguish, and bear it, and relax again as the surges passed, quiet steady throbbing in the brief respite between waves of pain. With the fervency of prayer, he closed his eyes and willed peace into that heart. Willed the cycles to lengthen, willed the breaks to get longer, pushed his will against the force of aching bereavement as if he had the power to help blunt it, flatten it. Daniel sighed, almost inaudibly, a wash of breath into the wash of breeze, a shuddery sound of relief, and Jack's eyes blinked open in surprise, as if his imaginary mental pushing had done some good.

"And you share it," he said, into the blue of the night and the sound-filled silence. Not thinking about the unimaginable absurdity that the pugnacious energy of his father, the indomitable fortitude of his mother, the passionate vitality of his son could be extinguished by something as simple as the chassis crapping out. Not thinking about that at all, because the muscle of his heart wasn't strong enough to handle the waves that thinking about that stuff would generate. But thinking that Daniel had something priceless there, in that faith of his, and if Jack's will could cross the uncrossable metaphysical gulf, maybe it wasn't so unthinkable that Daniel's could too.


End file.
